Project Evolution

Evolution of the Project

This project came about when we wanted to add electronic access controls and monitoring to our Hacker Space in Fullerton, CA.

When shopping for security products, the commercial solutions we found fell into one of the following categories:

• Name-brand solutions from U.S.A. or Europe that were good but really expensive and proprietary
• Questionable offshore solutions that were cheap but had no support and were also proprietary
• A few one-off custom designs people had made for themselves.

All of the commercial solutions had one thing in common: they were closed-source and we could not access the code in any way for customization or support of new devices.

Some of the custom designs we found looked promising, but were often based on a piece of difficult-to-source hardware that the creators had special access to.